Films like Cabaret have done much to shape our romanticised view of interwar Berlin as one long cocaine- and alcohol-fuelled party that only came to an end with the rise of fascism. This version of the era is brutally torn apart by the malevolent horror of George Grosz’s pictures. In his paintings and pen-and-ink illustrations, grotesque caricatures of sadistic skull-faced soldiers, defecating drunks and desperate sex workers combine to form a hideous and strangely comic vision of society gradually falling apart.
“Grosz perceived the 1920s as a society fleeing into sex and violence,” says Pay Matthis Karstens, curator of the newly opened Das kleine Grosz Museum in Schöneberg. “Often those two go hand in hand, and even combine into what is called Lustmord – murdering due to pleasure or sexual arousal. Like the killing of a prostitute after having sex with her.”
Such hideous acts of violence are a feature of Grosz’s work, which never shies away from revealing the worst of human behaviour as it appeared during one of the most volatile periods in world history. “He mirrored the most important caesuras of the century,” explains Karstens. “He was born and died in Berlin, and his work spans the German Empire, the Weimar years, the rise of the Nazis and the two world wars.”
As Berlin burns around them, a war profiteer, his coat filled with weaponry, bends down to whisper directly into the president’s ear.
Grosz was only briefly on the front during World War I – he was discharged early for ill health – but the unprecedented carnage he witnessed gave him a profound cynicism towards the German establishment. In the painting ‘Eclipse of the Sun’ (1926), then president of Germany Paul von Hindenburg sits at a table surrounded by headless politicians. As Berlin burns around them, a war profiteer, his coat filled with weaponry, bends down to whisper directly into the president’s ear.
Such critiques of the greed and callousness of the ruling classes were typical of Grosz and the Berlin Dada movement, who ferociously attacked a social order they saw as murderous and unfeeling. After WWI, European art shifted dramatically. Where it had previously appealed to the higher values of truth, beauty and reason, Grosz and the Dadaists’ anti-aesthetic posed a nihilistic response to societies that sacrificed their youth on the killing fields of Europe.
“Grosz was also the first visual artist to warn about the dangers of Hitler,” says Karstens, “and that was as far back as 1923, when Hitler was still confined to Munich beer cellars.” The Nazis despised Grosz, labelling him a prime “Bolshevik” enemy. The day after Hitler became Chancellor, Nazi stormtroopers smashed down his studio door only to discover that Grosz and his wife had emigrated to the US just two weeks before.
The new museum is located in a converted Shell petrol station on Schöneberg’s traffic-heavy Bülowstraße. The space is small, but it has enough room for a café with seating both indoors and outdoors in the museum’s bamboo garden. Without a collection of its own, the Grosz Museum will instead depend on loans from the artist’s estate, museums and private collections. “There will be a special exhibition every half year,” says Karstens. “The first, Groß to Grosz, will show his youthful drawings and sketches he made when he was just 12 and 13, and it will show his emergence as a political artist.”
Grosz’s emigration to the US – where much of his later work now resides – does in part explain why Berlin’s greatest visual chronicler has never before had his own dedicated museum. “He deserves more recognition,” says Karstens. “There are many artists who depicted high society, Ku’damm life or social injustice in Wedding back then, but he is the only artist who could convey the abstract political concepts that tied them all together.”
- Das kleine Grosz Museum, Schöneberg From May 13
